


One Dante, Al Dente

by ashfire



Category: Veronica Mars (TV), Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Post-Series, Stream of Consciousness, Wallace POV circa sophomore year, the one where Wallace is Wallace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-10
Updated: 2017-03-10
Packaged: 2018-10-02 04:38:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10209785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashfire/pseuds/ashfire
Summary: He doesn't think of himself as pure anything. He's mostly somewhere in the middle. He tries to make sense of it all so he can keep the ones whoarepure from the deep end. Sometimes.





	

His brother— _half-brother_ —is seven years old. That’s almost twelve whole years of embarrassments and life lessons he has on the little guy. If he has anything to say about it, the life lessons the boy  _does_ get between now and twelve more vanilla-cake-featuring birthdays will be a lot more reserved, and a whole lot less filled with suck. Father or no father, Darrell's big brother won’t allow him to be dangled from a flagpole in the nude. Or, he'll try to keep the duct tape away from the general crotch area, at the very least.

Darrell won’t be electrocuted by any secret societies, is the point.

Wallace likes to think of himself as the mellow type. He knows he makes friends easily; he knows he gives trust away like it’s candy corn on Halloween night. It’s not his fault that most people in this town tend not to know what to do with the little kernels; either they leave it to go stale in the pantry, or they get home with their spoils and out in the trash it goes.

Three years of Neptune life, and he’s beginning to think the blind trust thing might have been a bad idea. Possibly (probably). His few months of Chicago living did confirm that people _generally_ don’t know what to do with an unlimited supply of the candy corn, but Neptune people are also _generally_ just assholes. Try to be a loyal cashier, end up with painful, nearly balded nether regions. Try to be a loyal errand boy, end up with a devoted, nearly unemployed mother. Try to be a loyal boyfriend, end up with a nearly estranged best friend. Try to be a loyal best friend, end up with a nearly permanent copper wire scar. That last one still tingles sometimes when he sees that lone chair outside his mom’s room.

(Hell, it would probably be better if the mark _was_ permanent; he hears that battle scars go a long way with sorority girls.)

With the company he keeps, he isn’t even shocked when he inadvertently walks into some situation out of a bad daytime soap. He’s even less shocked when it’s in the company of a pint-sized amateur sleuth. Acceptance is that last stage before the coffin, so he figures it doesn’t have to mean he’s getting jaded or anything.

The world is a lot of things, not all pleasant, but it’s also usually a decent place to be. It doesn’t make much sense if he thinks too long, but he thinks that spending the wrong season in another ( _much_ hotter) continent and seeing a whole other level of suck is pretty strong evidence that home isn’t so bad.

Now, if only if one (former?) detective could have considered said evidence before calling it quits.

He isn’t even mad that she went off to a bigger campus and greener pastures. Not really. But he’d appreciate it if she wouldn’t write this _whole_ place off as a hellhole—or at least call more than a couple of times a month. Mostly, he hopes he isn’t a part of the load of suck this town has unloaded on her. He doesn’t think he is, but then again, he’s wrong as many times as he's right when it comes to her.

(At least when _he_ ran off with his long-lost Donnie Brasco father, he was planning on coming back.)

Sometimes, when he’s borderline delirious from studying or just really high on Nyquil, he thinks she’s right to think of this place as an island of indecency and chaos and corruption and just all-around _hell_ . There’s definitely a dichotomy between those who have lived their lives in and “just _know_ ” the place, and those who were dumb enough to attempt the outside-kind-of-life here. The latter, he gets. He _is_ one of the latter. But the former are like onions with layers of hope, venom, weariness, wariness, aloofness, apathy, sycophantism, and probably a few other grandiose adjectives he can’t think of right now. Also, they make him want to cry. Sometimes.

Like, say, her best (only) female friend. She’s smart, she’s sarcastic, and probably less socially awkward than she affects. But then, she’s also probably (definitely) just as filled with secrets and manipulations, and more than capable of fleecing oblivious snobs. If their mutual friend was more willing to share her friends, he might understand her better. He might even try his damnedest to look out for her, too. But as it is, it’s probably best to un-puzzle the puzzle of one beach-town-victim at a time.

He doesn’t think he’ll ever be as complicated as the ones born and raised here, but even he belongs here seven times more than Piz. Good old Piz: now that’s a contrast worthy of the new plasma screens. If the guy hadn’t already been forever scarred and utterly terrified of any and all contact sports since his run-in with Neptune’s Fists of Fury, he would probably be the perfect one to protect from the Tritons and the Castles around town. At this point, though, he thinks the guy would be better off just cutting his losses and skipping town. His initial reaction was to try returning that particular life lesson shot-for-shot, but for once he’s glad that  _she_ had her control-freak hat on that day. Having watched a fully grown man gasp with every breath for days (he _did_ warn him), he’s fairly certain he himself wasn’t quite ready to face jackass levels of audacious indifference, either. Rolling around in the mud even more won’t help anyone. So really, he should advise Piz to keep his distance or just split. Again.

(He thinks he might get used to his friends jumping ship. Any time, now.)

As for that _specific_ overzealous asshole (whom he will forevermore choose to blame for much of the suck), he won’t even attempt to pick at that particular baggage carousel. Bury your head in physics textbooks and your hands in double-ringed hoops, is the smart plan. Decoding the one guy who has been in an eccentric orbit around him since Pole Day (sometimes he thinks it’s the other way around) is a maze he wants no part of. No amount of prison experiments will convince him to get into that rabbit hole. Neptune life is Wonderland enough, thank you very much.

(He wonders if that’s the way she sees it—as if she’s found her way back to the riverbank. He just wishes he was the one reading the pictureless book there. Sometimes.)

Keeping his people out of the inner circle of Pacific Coast Hell increasingly seems like an impossibility. For most of them, the fire closes in by the day. He wonders if he can help them emerge from it less brittle than they would otherwise, or—at least for those who just get caught in orbit of the oxidizers around them—keep them from collapsing. If the one person who has always fed on the heat of the epicenter can reach escape velocity, he thinks he should be able to keep the young and innocent mostly away from the circles. It’s the least he can do when keeping away for his own sake seems so unnecessary.

Stiffen up that upper lip, Fennel (because that _is_ his name), and dodge those curveballs for everyone’s sake.

Sometimes, he wonders if being lured back into the fray isn’t the refrain. If someone with the real battle scars can keep away, maybe it isn’t so inevitable.

**Author's Note:**

> Wallace has always been the one who is paradoxically divorced from the thick of things, but is somehow still always right at home. This is the one where I try to disentangle some of that mess by making a bigger mess of it. Let me know if it works, because I subsist entirely on readers' words when I'm in one of my writing moods. I physically consume them. Words.


End file.
